Thursday 14 October 2010 11.40 EDT
First published on Thursday 14 October 2010 11.40 EDT

Daniel Bye wrote recently about the satisfaction of hearing his native Middlesbrough accent in a stage play. He made the point that authenticity is essential if a dramatist is to create an accurate picture of our lives, past and present. I agree. My play Senghenydd tells the story of Britain's biggest mining disaster, the 97th anniversary of which falls today. The explosion in the South Wales pit killed 440 men and boys, 23 aged between 14 and 16 (one of the fatalities was a rescuer). The cause, as with the Chilean miners, was a lack of adequate safety procedures. As a piece of social history, the story of corporate greed, exploitation, heroism and the way in which a community can pull together is as relevant today as it was a century ago.

The heroism is awe-inspiring. With hand-held fire extinguishers, no breathing apparatus for three hours and no water supply below ground, the Senghenydd rescuers worked in visibility of a few inches and almost unbearable temperatures. They brought up 489 men and boys (there were nearly a thousand men below ground when the explosion went off); the rest were trapped behind a wall of fire. Miraculously, 18 men were rescued from beyond the flames. They included a distant cousin of mine, Joe Evans, who was aged 19 at the time – a fact that I discovered by chance in a conversation with my great-uncle over two decades ago. It was a piece of family and social history about which I knew nothing.

Drama can tell us our history through the eyes of the best witnesses, the people who lived it. So before I started writing I went in search of their voices. I searched archives containing recordings and verbatim transcriptions of people who lived in that time and place, to capture their vocabulary and patterns and rhythm of speech. In a kind of organic process, the characters emerged from the voices. The few lines that I pinched from one transcript gave me the key to one of my characters, so that I felt I knew exactly how to write for him. I researched what it was like to work in the pit and to be trapped, and that helped me to develop the psychology of the main character.

To say something truthful about the human condition, the writer has to present the specific, the experience of the individual. An actor plays the specific, so he needs a script that gives a view through the eyes of the character. As Daniel notes, an all-purpose Geordie – or, indeed, an all-purpose South Walian – cannot convey any kind of truth about the human condition because the entire characterisation is founded on a lie; the listener knows when dialogue is authentic and can grasp the meaning, though the words and patterns of speech may be unfamiliar.

When my play was staged at Cardiff's Sherman Theatre in 1991 we used scaffolding to create different levels – the hillside overlooking the village, the interiors of houses, the air pocket in the pit in which the 18 survivors were trapped behind the fire. We worked with improvisation, allowing actors to bring all their creativity and imagination to their roles.

The story of Senghenydd made headlines around the world but the authorities were all for a cover-up. Pressure from the Miners' Federation eventually forced the prosecution of the mine's owner, Lewis Merthyr Collieries. Local magistrates accepted the company's defence that it took no part in the management of the mine, but fined the manager, Edward Shaw, £24 – as a local newspaper put it, valuing men's lives at just over a shilling each. The decision to exonerate the company was overturned by the court of appeal, and the same magistrates reluctantly fined it £10.

The story of the Chilean miners now being played out will doubtless become a Hollywood screenplay. The stereotypes are being created by the media and all of us as we watch. But the questions arises – will their authentic voices be heard?

- This article originally said that 2010 is the 98th anniversary of the Senghenydd disaster; this has now been corrected